***
Standing on stage at a high school football stadium where Mr. Romney appeared, dressed in a black silk shirt with sparkling buttons and sequin-studded sleeves, Meat Loaf said that, at age 65, he was new to national politics, something that quickly became evident. “I want you to know at 65 that Paul Ryan has not pushed me off the cliff in a wheelchair,” he said to nervous laughter.

Yet. After last night, all bets are off.

In a globe-trotting survey, he assessed what awaits the next president. “There has stormclouds come over the United States.” (Yes, he said it just like that.)

“There is thunderstorms over Europe,” Meat Loaf said. “There are hailstorms, and I mean major hailstorms, in the Middle East. There are storms brewing through China, through Asia, through everywhere, and there’s only one man that on the other night when President Barack Obama, God bless him, said to Mitt Romney, ‘The cold war is over.’ I have never heard such a thing in my life. The man needs to understand Putin and Russia, so I want you to know that there is one man who will stand tall in this country and fight the storm and bring the United States back to what it should be … Gov. Mitt Romney!

Meat Loaf said that he began to privately support Mr. Romney a year ago and had decided to take it public during a rally on a high school football field, where he performed “Stand in the Storm.” “I know there’s one thing that you’ve been taught your whole life is that you never argue politics or religion with your friends, but 2012 is completely different,” Meat Loaf said, calling the race “the most important election in the history of the United States.” He said he had called three Democratic friends in California on Thursday to make the case for Mr. Romney. “I got two of them to switch to Romney, so two out of three ain’t bad,” he said.

> 1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

You can, however, legislate policies that make it less attractive for the already-wealthy to get even more wealthy by squeezing everybody else. We did these things in this country, and it worked out pretty well for most Americans and let them earn a middle class income.

>2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

So you understand the problems people have with hedge fund managers, credit default swap traders, Wall Street wheeler-dealers, CEOs with cozy relationships to those determining their compensation, and others who seem to worship at the altar of Maximizing Profit? Up to a certain point most of these people do provide a useful service in allocating resources for wealth creation, and deserve compensation. However, above a certain level they are extracting more wealth than their services are worth. It gets worse when that extraction becomes detached from how they make their money and to any outside accountability for how much they stuff into their own pockets.

In those cases they are "receiving without working for", and that removes resources available to those who do the actual work.

> 3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

Get back to me on that one when you apply it to government contractors, especially ones for the Defense Department with cozy relationships with politicians and plenty of lobbyists. We spend more on our military than the next largest six countries combined, and most of them are our allies. You really think we're getting top value for all that money?

> 4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

Horseshit. You don't run an engine without "dividing" the lube. If it doesn't get to all the moving parts, it's going to break down quicker and harder.

If someone never changes the oil in their car, are they being thrifty and efficient? Or a short-sighted idiot?

>5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other
>half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does
>no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the
>beginning of the end of any nation.

So is believing that statement when it's not true. Acting on faulty information rarely produces the desired results.

This cartoon is one of Thomas Nast's most famous. It depicts Roman Catholic clergy as crocodiles invading America's shore to devour the nation's schoolchildren--white, black, American Indian, and Chinese. (The white children are prominent in front, the rest are in the background.) The public school building stands as a fortress against the threat of theocracy, but it has been bombarded and flies Old Glory upside down to signal distress.

Education in nineteenth-century America was provided by a variety of private, charitable, public, and combined public-private institutions, with the public school movement gaining strength over the decades. A major political issue during the 1870s was whether state and municipal governments should allocate funds for religiously affiliated schools, many of which were Roman Catholic. In most public schools, the Protestant version of the Bible was read, Protestant prayers were uttered, and Protestant teachers taught Protestant moral lessons. (Notice the boy in the cartoon who protects the younger students from the Catholic onslaught carries a Bible in his coat.) Catholic (and some Protestant) leaders asked that parochial schools receive their fair share of public funds. Protestant defenders of public schools erroneously considered that request to be an attempt by Catholics to destroy the spreading public school system.
***
The publishers and staff of Harper’s Weekly, including cartoonist Thomas Nast, were mainly Protestant or secular liberals. Like most such Americans, they believed that the Roman Catholic Church was an antiquated, authoritarian institution that stood against the “Modernism” of a progressive society and democratic political institutions. Irish-Catholics in particular were suspected of being loyal primarily to the Vatican, rather than to the United States, and of not being capable of assimilation by nature or stubborn will. Furthermore, Irish-Catholics were overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party, and more politically involved than other ethnic groups. The Republican newspaper was vehemently opposed to what it believed was the growing political and social influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

This chart just shows the taxable-income levels where one rate changed to the next. (Perhaps someone with better graphic presentation skills can get a better version). It doesn't show the rates themselves (go to the link above for the charts).

What I mainly wanted to show when I made this is how we treated income levels in the tax system in the past, which is a separate issue from what the rates actually were. For instance, during Obama's presidency there have been lots of arguments about raising taxes on income over $250,000 (often framed as "is $250 thousand/year 'rich'?&quot. In comparison, in 1955 there were 24 tax brackets (4 times as many as now). 16 of them, two-thirds of that number, affected taxable incomes over the equivalent of $250K. The highest bracket (the 91% one) affected income over ~$1.6million. OMG, Class Warfare! Socialism! Marxism!

And we know what sort of people were calling the president 'communist' back then. Birchers and other ranting cranks.

Investigative journalist Robert Parry writes yesterday of researching in the National Archives and finding some four pages of prepared "zingers" for Pres. George H.W. Bush in preparation for their Oct. 11, 1992 debate. Parry also goes into many of the early RW smears about Clinton that these played on. Most of these smears were ginned up by the Bush campaign itself, seeking to paint Clinton (the 'pro-business' "New Democrat" who made a point of not being beholden to traditional Democratic 'special' interest constituencies) as a some sort of radical (even a closeted communist). Parry goes into the background on some of those smears.

The excerpt below is a demonstration that "zingers" can backfire. When Bush tried to question Clinton's patriotism, he mangled it with his usual word salad, and Clinton had a riposte that hit him right between the eyes and completely derails any further "zinger"-usage by Bush.

When Debate ‘Zingers’ BackfiredOctober 1, 2012

By Robert Parry

***

However, the “zinger” ambush was spoiled when Bush clumsily tried to impugn Clinton’s patriotism and encountered a strong counterattack. Early in the debate, Bush raised the loyalty issue in response to a question about character, but the incumbent’s message was lost in a cascade of inarticulate sentence fragments.

“I said something the other day where I was accused of being like Joe McCarthy because I question — I’ll put it this way, I think it’s wrong to demonstrate against your own country or organize demonstrations against your own country in foreign soil,” Bush said.

“I just think it’s wrong. I — that — maybe — they say, ‘well, it was a youthful indiscretion.’ I was 19 or 20 flying off an aircraft carrier and that shaped me to be commander in chief of the armed forces, and — I’m sorry but demonstrating — it’s not a question of patriotism, it’s a question of character and judgment.”

“When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”